Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Last Sunday (6th of November 2016) I spent almost the whole day on my feet talking to people at the Adelaide Maker Faire. It was a great event and I have been looking forward to it for almost a full year.

It took a bit of preparation in putting together a demo that would pass the electrical safety requirements and be tested and tagged. I chose to use a compact fluroscent lamp and a halogen lamp as my demo loads to illustrate the impact of power factor on energy measurements. The modern CFL's have notoriously low power-factor due to the uncompensated choke in them. I ended up making an earthed and a double insulated enclosure for my demo.

Earthed Test lamp box

Double insulated test lamp box

Earthed lamp fixture with Perspex lid

The main PCB on show was the Energy Monitor Featherwing with the ATM90E26 on-board. This does very quick and accurate measurements and I chose to send the data over serial to a laptop for graphing rather than use the rather crowded wifi and 3G environment at the faire. It also makes a more compelling demo since I can sample and display the power every second rather than every 15s with thingspeak (faster with workarounds still only down to 2s due to 8 channel limitation, must investigate running my personal Blynk or EmonCMS server).

ATM90E26 Low-voltage Energy Monitor (perspective view)

ATM90E26 Energy Monitor top view

My overall display was pretty minimalist since I focused on getting the hardware working rather than producing any marketing material. I ended up handing out notes written on the spot with my details on them. There was fair bit of interest and some people shared ideas with me on how they had solved the same problem themselves. I hardly got time to check out other displays myself. Next time I will make sure I have someone to relieve me. I did manage to have a peek at the Daleks and saw a toddler hop out of a solar car, sights you can only see at a Maker Faire. This was southern hemispheres biggest and the buzz was amazing.

Maker Faire setup with lamps on

At the end of the day the organisers of the Maker Faire handed me a maker of merit badge which I am quite proud of and next year I plan to show up with even more projects.